Televisions are the same as microphones - they're used everywhere, but they look nothing like the bulky box with the rabbit-ear antenna on top that adorns icons. And changing them to look like modern televisions wouldn't work, cause modern televisions aren't really iconic - most consumer electronic devices seem to be converging on a featureless black box (physical description, not poorly-understood process metaphor).
Magnifying Glasses and Binoculars - I can't remember the last time I've used either of those. Maybe it is a disinterest with the great outdoors - or just a drop in bird-watching as a relatively common pastime. I know plenty of people who go camping, trekking, geo-caching (if you count that) - and none of them regularly use binoculars. I've very rarely even seen magnifying glasses in the stereotypical design - although my grandparents used a square-framed magnifying glass for reading until we got them a kindle.
Wrenches and gears - I use a wrench to change my car tires. That's about it. And there just aren't that many everyday mechanical objects anymore that people have common exposure to those elements. Almost everything that used to be mechanical is now electronic.
Some simple analysis allows him to predict quite accurately what you are going to buy and when you are going to buy it. So he jacks up those prices on D-1 and lowers them again on D+1. The Walmart grocery store in my neighborhood appears to be already doing this; the variance I get in the price of a Red Baron pizza correlates too strongly with payroll dates for the lower middle class neighborhood I live in for it to be a coincidence.
Price fluctuates with demand you say? Egads, you should write a paper!
Actually, in many of those places, the codified punishment for men caught in adultery is also death. It just so happens that it rarely actually gets carried out. The woman gets it in the neck, and the man goes on his way.
Disney movies (some of them anyway) do this too. Except first you sit through a little screen telling you that this DVD has fastplay technology. That's right, apparently just playing the damn movie is a technology now.
To play a DVD (Without breaking the encryption, which is illegal in the US)
Fixed that for you.
Re:Shouldn't shareholders demand an asset auction.
on
BlackBerry 10 Unveiled
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· Score: 3, Interesting
People will cling to capitalism long after it has ceased to be an effective way to distribute wealth.
Thing is, capitalism wasn't "designed" to distribute wealth. It was designed to promote productivity. The basic deal of capitalism is: produce more, get more wealth. It's a decent concept. Where it falls down, though, is when you're at the upper end of the capital curve. Then you get more wealth, not by producing more, but by already owning lots of wealth. The trait of capital to self-perpetuating in large amounts, and the capacity for capital to be passed down to people who haven't had to work for it are two properties that (IMO) undermine the system.
If you're in such a country, you don't need OONI - you know you're already censored.
This looks to be more a tool against those regimes that claim to be open and against censorship, by pulling aside the curtain and revealing the reality - as, according to TFA, has already happened in Palestine.
I don't know about Twitter at least, but on Facebook, all the posts came from the Social Loot application. It took all of 5 seconds to "block all posts from Social Loot" to my wall, and now I need never know of its existence (except for Slashdot - thanks guys).
The finding comes from an analysis of the birth, death, and marital records of 5923 people born between 1760 and 1849 in four farming or fishing villages in Finland
So the headline might better have been "Was humanity still evolving 250 years ago in Finland?"
From TFA: "Almost half of the people died before age 15, for example, suggesting that they had traits disfavored by natural selection, such as susceptibility to disease." "the variation in the number of offspring—from zero to 17—indicates there was a large opportunity for selection to occur. "
So at least two of the properties they observed in the study from a fishing village 250 years ago in Finland are not mirrored in developed nations today.
And I'll only have dialogues with people who don't think that requiring people to secure their router is equivalent to allowing murder gangs to roam the streets unopposed. From we're I sit, it's all plus.
No. You're discussing technological feasibility - and how complex it would be to implement, as well as risk-reward ratios. Which completely fails to address the matter in terms of rights in law.
You're discussing "adding" a new right. That is, that people have the right to broadcast their information and demand that people not read it. This is not currently a right, as TFA states. You are looking to expand government protection into a new area. I'm providing reasons why that protection is unnecessary. Those reasons are technical, and risk related, as well as moral - that is, making individuals take responsibility for their own dissemination of their data.
If your grandmother can pick up my wifi data with Open Office, please do arrange a meeting with her for me
Hell, my grandma can do that with a base install of windows, if you don't secure your wi-fi.
True, but irrelevant. We're not discussing how using wifi routers violates someone else's rights.
Yes, you are. You're discussing how to restrict my right to access information that a wi-fi router transmits into public space.
If you demonstrate intent to nab someone's papers, or in this case wifi data, you've demonstrated an intent to violate their rights and act on it.
And my point was that by installing a router and configuring it to broadcast unencrypted data, you've demonstrated an intent to share that data.
Another dodge. You maintain that in using open wifi routers, one has relinquished any right to expectations of privacy. And that is bunk.
Why is that bunk? In using a public park, you relinquish any expectations of privacy. In using public transport, you relinquish any expectation of privacy. The very definition of public is that is distinct from private.
Yet you neglect that the same argument would be absurd for either, which was my point.
No, you were making a ridiculous analogy between two things that are not analogous.
At this point, you're visibly sabotaging the conversation.
No, I'm mocking you. I'm doing so in an attempt to dissuade you from making ridiculous and emotionality-laden comparisons to mass butchery any more.
No, it was half-in, half-out. By that I mean it was being used in their homes, and "leaked" out because that's what airwaves do. Which isn't typically a big deal, since one hardly expects people to be sitting outside trying to pick it up.
Yes. In other words, you need to consider more than just the most common case. You also need to consider edge cases, and the potential damage versus the likelihood versus the difficulty to mitigate. In this case, the edge case is likely - anyone with a laptop could do it, and have been known to (see wardriving), the damage is potentially severe - especially if you do stupid stuff like sending sensitive data in the clear over email, and the difficulty to mitigate is trivial.
There's nothing technologically complicated about using a handgun either, and using one could certainly save you from a violent mugging.
No. However, securing your router doesn't inflict bodily harm on a human being, require special licensing, or open you to the possibility of charges arising from its use (yet). Are you sure you're not BadAnalogyGuy in drag? Having a gun is a complex piece of mitigation, involving training and licensing, and may not even be effective, as presence of a firearm might prevent, or it might provoke escalation. Better mitigation would simply be not to go to dangerous areas at night. Not foolproof, but it reduces the chances of occurrence down to the point where I've never been mugged in my life.
Whenever you leave your home, there is also a slight chance that it will rain no matter what the weather report says.
Which is why I keep an umbrella in the car.
You might get slammed by a car as you cross the street, therefore you should never leave the house without a pair of clean underwear on, in case you have an unanticipated ambulance ride to the hospital to worry about
And that's at a level of severity I really don't worry about. For various values of "clean" anyway.
And you might run into some tourists from Spain who don't speak English while you're out.
Again, level of severity is negligible. Why do I care if I can speak to the tourists or not?
Therefore, you should never leave the house without a loaded handgun, a large umbrella, a pair of clean underwear on, and a Spanish-to-English translation dictionary. Otherwise, it's your own damn fault.
Well, if you get caught in the rain without an umbrella, yes, it is your own damn fault. What do you want, the government to outlaw rain?
My point, however, remains. Kismet does not come standard, you have to purposely install it - usually to sniff another person's otherwise-private network traffic.
Your threshold for "modification" seems to be unrealistically low - considering that would mean my grandma's computer with Open Office on it would be considered "specially modified technology".
And a wireless router does not come standard either. You need to purposely install it, usually to transmit information. If you wish to restrict the information it transmits, it behoves you to configure it so it operates in a way that you see fit. If you do not have the time or the capacity to read a simple instruction manual, then you should hire someone who does. The 12 year old kid down the street charges reasonable rates I hear. If you don't understand the device you installed, nor had an informed person configure it for you, then yes, you were negligent and the fact that you didn't know that you were shouting your information for all to hear merely emphasizes that point.
You seem to be adopting the position that no, that's perfectly alright, the citizenry had no reasonable expectation of a right to privacy there. That packet sniffing, as deliberate as it usually has to be, is just as easy to do and probably as someone glancing in your window.
The wifi data was half-in, half-out of their private homes
No, it was out. The Google car never entered their property, and yet was able to capture that information in its entirety. It was wholly out of their home.
It was meant to be used by them, in their homes
They might have intended for it to only be in use in their home, but they never took the simple necessary technological measure to make it so (encrypting it) which is not a difficult thing to do with a home-use wi-fi router, even for a novice. It just requires them to read the manual.
and technology had to be specifically modified and sent out in order to intercept it
No, no it didn't. One of the details in this case is that Google basically just used an off-the-shelf piece of software to dump all publicly available information. They caught that data because they didn't customize it.
If Google itself had condoned it, there would be little difference between that and seeking to obtain Zero-Day exploits to commercial systems - with the exception that these are private individuals, not mere corporations.
And the fact that there was no security to actually exploit.
With all the hullabaloo from the MPAA and RIAA about ownership rights to for-profit data, we have at least as much right to our data as private citizens
You do. So bloody well tick the little box that says "WEP". Note that's not going to protect you against even the most inept hacker, as its known broken, but Google wouldn't have read your data.
Otherwise there's no point to having a government, if it doesn't uphold our rights.
See, I don't really see the "right to run wi-fi without reading the manual" as worthy of government protection.
Oooh, let me try. It's like two people having sex in their street-facing bedroom without closing the curtains, and complaining when a passerby sees them.
I'm confused. Why would anyone copy a collection of ones and zeros that had no value?
They do have value. They have no inherent value, which was the distinction the OP made. Just like a coin, which has an inherent value (the value of its component metals) much lower than it's actual value (the price of goods people are willing to exchange for it).
Ok, I mean importing for a private individual. Companies have economies of scale, trade agreements, offshore assembly, etc etc to reduce the actual cost of importation.
Because importing a BMW from the US is a pain in the butt; not to mention, the car would then have left-hand drive, which Australian customers are unsued to. On the other hand, routing a download from the US, or spoofing an online service into thinking you're buying from the US is trivial.
Take iPhones, iPads, and even iPods out of Apple, and you'd still have a small, but profitable PC vendor. You could call it Macintosh Corporation and people would immediately know what it was about.
Take Windows and Office out of Microsoft, and you'd have a large, disorganized mess of marginal products and services. What would you call that? Xbox, SQL Server, Sharepoint, Bing, We Make Pretty Good Keyboards, Oh And We Still Make Zunes For Some Reason Incorporated? Try coming up with a business plan for that train wreck.
According to Tim Cook, " it took us 22 years to sell 55 million Macs". Since 2006, Microsoft sold 67 million X-Box 360s. Even just a fraction of Microsoft's remaining product lines would out-sell Apple's remaining one. Not to mention all the big business software that you failed to mention - stuff like Exchange, and ActiveDirectory.
As for a business plan, a company doesn't have to have one unified business plan of everything, integrating all their products into one inter-woven masterplan. That's why companies, especially large ones, divide themselves up into divisions. Microsoft's not planning to leverage their Exchange install-base to get an X-Box in every server closet. They're both successful (well, successfully-selling) products, and they're marketed and sold entirely independently. And as long as each division, and each product line has a valid business plan, why bother unnecessarily trying to mash them all together?
It'd only take a brief flip through my posting history to show I'm not a particular fan of Microsoft - nor of Apple. I'm typing this from my Linux Mint machine - I don't have a horse in this particular race. But saying that Apple is the more successful company because it's got a diversified set of product lines is ludicrous. Microsoft has a diversified set of products. Apple is intensely focussed on the end-user electronics market.
Now, you can make an argument over whether an intense focus or diversification is better, and you can certainly make an argument that Apple is more successful than Microsoft, but I cannot see any logic behind claiming, as the OP did, that Apple is more successful than Microsoft because it is more diversified. That's just...wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Televisions are the same as microphones - they're used everywhere, but they look nothing like the bulky box with the rabbit-ear antenna on top that adorns icons. And changing them to look like modern televisions wouldn't work, cause modern televisions aren't really iconic - most consumer electronic devices seem to be converging on a featureless black box (physical description, not poorly-understood process metaphor).
Magnifying Glasses and Binoculars - I can't remember the last time I've used either of those. Maybe it is a disinterest with the great outdoors - or just a drop in bird-watching as a relatively common pastime. I know plenty of people who go camping, trekking, geo-caching (if you count that) - and none of them regularly use binoculars. I've very rarely even seen magnifying glasses in the stereotypical design - although my grandparents used a square-framed magnifying glass for reading until we got them a kindle.
Wrenches and gears - I use a wrench to change my car tires. That's about it. And there just aren't that many everyday mechanical objects anymore that people have common exposure to those elements. Almost everything that used to be mechanical is now electronic.
Some simple analysis allows him to predict quite accurately what you are going to buy and when you are going to buy it. So he jacks up those prices on D-1 and lowers them again on D+1. The Walmart grocery store in my neighborhood appears to be already doing this; the variance I get in the price of a Red Baron pizza correlates too strongly with payroll dates for the lower middle class neighborhood I live in for it to be a coincidence.
Price fluctuates with demand you say? Egads, you should write a paper!
and a comprehensive vetting process for websites and their operators.
What, like the one required to get a signed SSL cert? Oh wait, I mean the one to get an "Extended Validation" SSL cert.
Actually, in many of those places, the codified punishment for men caught in adultery is also death. It just so happens that it rarely actually gets carried out. The woman gets it in the neck, and the man goes on his way.
Disney movies (some of them anyway) do this too. Except first you sit through a little screen telling you that this DVD has fastplay technology. That's right, apparently just playing the damn movie is a technology now.
To play a DVD (Without breaking the encryption, which is illegal in the US)
Fixed that for you.
People will cling to capitalism long after it has ceased to be an effective way to distribute wealth.
Thing is, capitalism wasn't "designed" to distribute wealth. It was designed to promote productivity. The basic deal of capitalism is: produce more, get more wealth. It's a decent concept. Where it falls down, though, is when you're at the upper end of the capital curve. Then you get more wealth, not by producing more, but by already owning lots of wealth. The trait of capital to self-perpetuating in large amounts, and the capacity for capital to be passed down to people who haven't had to work for it are two properties that (IMO) undermine the system.
If you're in such a country, you don't need OONI - you know you're already censored.
This looks to be more a tool against those regimes that claim to be open and against censorship, by pulling aside the curtain and revealing the reality - as, according to TFA, has already happened in Palestine.
I don't know about Twitter at least, but on Facebook, all the posts came from the Social Loot application. It took all of 5 seconds to "block all posts from Social Loot" to my wall, and now I need never know of its existence (except for Slashdot - thanks guys).
The finding comes from an analysis of the birth, death, and marital records of 5923 people born between 1760 and 1849 in four farming or fishing villages in Finland
So the headline might better have been "Was humanity still evolving 250 years ago in Finland?"
From TFA:
"Almost half of the people died before age 15, for example, suggesting that they had traits disfavored by natural selection, such as susceptibility to disease."
"the variation in the number of offspring—from zero to 17—indicates there was a large opportunity for selection to occur. "
So at least two of the properties they observed in the study from a fishing village 250 years ago in Finland are not mirrored in developed nations today.
If my eyes see two ugly people having sex, believe me, they're going to be discarding hell for leather too.
And I'll only have dialogues with people who don't think that requiring people to secure their router is equivalent to allowing murder gangs to roam the streets unopposed. From we're I sit, it's all plus.
No. You're discussing technological feasibility - and how complex it would be to implement, as well as risk-reward ratios. Which completely fails to address the matter in terms of rights in law.
You're discussing "adding" a new right. That is, that people have the right to broadcast their information and demand that people not read it. This is not currently a right, as TFA states. You are looking to expand government protection into a new area. I'm providing reasons why that protection is unnecessary. Those reasons are technical, and risk related, as well as moral - that is, making individuals take responsibility for their own dissemination of their data.
If your grandmother can pick up my wifi data with Open Office, please do arrange a meeting with her for me
Hell, my grandma can do that with a base install of windows, if you don't secure your wi-fi.
True, but irrelevant. We're not discussing how using wifi routers violates someone else's rights.
Yes, you are. You're discussing how to restrict my right to access information that a wi-fi router transmits into public space.
If you demonstrate intent to nab someone's papers, or in this case wifi data, you've demonstrated an intent to violate their rights and act on it.
And my point was that by installing a router and configuring it to broadcast unencrypted data, you've demonstrated an intent to share that data.
Another dodge. You maintain that in using open wifi routers, one has relinquished any right to expectations of privacy. And that is bunk.
Why is that bunk? In using a public park, you relinquish any expectations of privacy. In using public transport, you relinquish any expectation of privacy. The very definition of public is that is distinct from private.
Yet you neglect that the same argument would be absurd for either, which was my point.
No, you were making a ridiculous analogy between two things that are not analogous.
At this point, you're visibly sabotaging the conversation.
No, I'm mocking you. I'm doing so in an attempt to dissuade you from making ridiculous and emotionality-laden comparisons to mass butchery any more.
Why would we?
No, it was half-in, half-out. By that I mean it was being used in their homes, and "leaked" out because that's what airwaves do. Which isn't typically a big deal, since one hardly expects people to be sitting outside trying to pick it up.
Yes. In other words, you need to consider more than just the most common case. You also need to consider edge cases, and the potential damage versus the likelihood versus the difficulty to mitigate. In this case, the edge case is likely - anyone with a laptop could do it, and have been known to (see wardriving), the damage is potentially severe - especially if you do stupid stuff like sending sensitive data in the clear over email, and the difficulty to mitigate is trivial.
There's nothing technologically complicated about using a handgun either, and using one could certainly save you from a violent mugging.
No. However, securing your router doesn't inflict bodily harm on a human being, require special licensing, or open you to the possibility of charges arising from its use (yet). Are you sure you're not BadAnalogyGuy in drag? Having a gun is a complex piece of mitigation, involving training and licensing, and may not even be effective, as presence of a firearm might prevent, or it might provoke escalation. Better mitigation would simply be not to go to dangerous areas at night. Not foolproof, but it reduces the chances of occurrence down to the point where I've never been mugged in my life.
Whenever you leave your home, there is also a slight chance that it will rain no matter what the weather report says.
Which is why I keep an umbrella in the car.
You might get slammed by a car as you cross the street, therefore you should never leave the house without a pair of clean underwear on, in case you have an unanticipated ambulance ride to the hospital to worry about
And that's at a level of severity I really don't worry about. For various values of "clean" anyway.
And you might run into some tourists from Spain who don't speak English while you're out.
Again, level of severity is negligible. Why do I care if I can speak to the tourists or not?
Therefore, you should never leave the house without a loaded handgun, a large umbrella, a pair of clean underwear on, and a Spanish-to-English translation dictionary. Otherwise, it's your own damn fault.
Well, if you get caught in the rain without an umbrella, yes, it is your own damn fault. What do you want, the government to outlaw rain?
My point, however, remains. Kismet does not come standard, you have to purposely install it - usually to sniff another person's otherwise-private network traffic.
Your threshold for "modification" seems to be unrealistically low - considering that would mean my grandma's computer with Open Office on it would be considered "specially modified technology".
And a wireless router does not come standard either. You need to purposely install it, usually to transmit information. If you wish to restrict the information it transmits, it behoves you to configure it so it operates in a way that you see fit. If you do not have the time or the capacity to read a simple instruction manual, then you should hire someone who does. The 12 year old kid down the street charges reasonable rates I hear. If you don't understand the device you installed, nor had an informed person configure it for you, then yes, you were negligent and the fact that you didn't know that you were shouting your information for all to hear merely emphasizes that point.
You seem to be adopting the position that no, that's perfectly alright, the citizenry had no reasonable expectation of a right to privacy there. That packet sniffing, as deliberate as it usually has to be, is just as easy to do and probably as someone glancing in your window.
If you had a laptop with you, you probably did.
The wifi data was half-in, half-out of their private homes
No, it was out. The Google car never entered their property, and yet was able to capture that information in its entirety. It was wholly out of their home.
It was meant to be used by them, in their homes
They might have intended for it to only be in use in their home, but they never took the simple necessary technological measure to make it so (encrypting it) which is not a difficult thing to do with a home-use wi-fi router, even for a novice. It just requires them to read the manual.
and technology had to be specifically modified and sent out in order to intercept it
No, no it didn't. One of the details in this case is that Google basically just used an off-the-shelf piece of software to dump all publicly available information. They caught that data because they didn't customize it.
If Google itself had condoned it, there would be little difference between that and seeking to obtain Zero-Day exploits to commercial systems - with the exception that these are private individuals, not mere corporations.
And the fact that there was no security to actually exploit.
With all the hullabaloo from the MPAA and RIAA about ownership rights to for-profit data, we have at least as much right to our data as private citizens
You do. So bloody well tick the little box that says "WEP". Note that's not going to protect you against even the most inept hacker, as its known broken, but Google wouldn't have read your data.
Otherwise there's no point to having a government, if it doesn't uphold our rights.
See, I don't really see the "right to run wi-fi without reading the manual" as worthy of government protection.
Oooh, let me try. It's like two people having sex in their street-facing bedroom without closing the curtains, and complaining when a passerby sees them.
Consider what you're saying. It's like condoning someone who breaks
Wrong. There were no locks for them to break
and enters
Wrong. People were transmitting their information into the street, Google didn't have to enter anything
Want to try again with another analogy?
I'm confused. Why would anyone copy a collection of ones and zeros that had no value?
They do have value. They have no inherent value, which was the distinction the OP made. Just like a coin, which has an inherent value (the value of its component metals) much lower than it's actual value (the price of goods people are willing to exchange for it).
Ok, I mean importing for a private individual. Companies have economies of scale, trade agreements, offshore assembly, etc etc to reduce the actual cost of importation.
How does BMW sell any cars in Australia?
Because importing a BMW from the US is a pain in the butt; not to mention, the car would then have left-hand drive, which Australian customers are unsued to. On the other hand, routing a download from the US, or spoofing an online service into thinking you're buying from the US is trivial.
Also, you can't torrent a BMW.
He didn't use that word, but it's what he said:
Take away Windows and Office and Microsoft would cease to exist
Microsoft has retreated to the safety of two successful product lines
Take iPhones, iPads, and even iPods out of Apple, and you'd still have a small, but profitable PC vendor. You could call it Macintosh Corporation and people would immediately know what it was about.
Take Windows and Office out of Microsoft, and you'd have a large, disorganized mess of marginal products and services. What would you call that? Xbox, SQL Server, Sharepoint, Bing, We Make Pretty Good Keyboards, Oh And We Still Make Zunes For Some Reason Incorporated? Try coming up with a business plan for that train wreck.
According to Tim Cook, " it took us 22 years to sell 55 million Macs". Since 2006, Microsoft sold 67 million X-Box 360s. Even just a fraction of Microsoft's remaining product lines would out-sell Apple's remaining one. Not to mention all the big business software that you failed to mention - stuff like Exchange, and ActiveDirectory.
As for a business plan, a company doesn't have to have one unified business plan of everything, integrating all their products into one inter-woven masterplan. That's why companies, especially large ones, divide themselves up into divisions. Microsoft's not planning to leverage their Exchange install-base to get an X-Box in every server closet. They're both successful (well, successfully-selling) products, and they're marketed and sold entirely independently. And as long as each division, and each product line has a valid business plan, why bother unnecessarily trying to mash them all together?
It'd only take a brief flip through my posting history to show I'm not a particular fan of Microsoft - nor of Apple. I'm typing this from my Linux Mint machine - I don't have a horse in this particular race. But saying that Apple is the more successful company because it's got a diversified set of product lines is ludicrous. Microsoft has a diversified set of products. Apple is intensely focussed on the end-user electronics market.
Now, you can make an argument over whether an intense focus or diversification is better, and you can certainly make an argument that Apple is more successful than Microsoft, but I cannot see any logic behind claiming, as the OP did, that Apple is more successful than Microsoft because it is more diversified. That's just...wrong.
Same reason people buy a desktop and a laptop? They're fundamentally the same device, but different form factors are useful in different situations.